Product Description

Landscape the gardens of the Alhambra by planting orange trees, lemon trees, palm trees and lavender trees. The playing tiles lie in front of you. Each one shows four different kinds of tree, with varying numbers of each tree. Plant your trees skillfully so that you surround as many buildings as possible. And remember that some buildings are more valuable than others: a tower is worth more than a seraglio and chambers more than the arcades.

Product Information

Language Requirements:
Game components are language-independent.
Manufacturer's rules are printed in multiple languages (including English).
This is an international edition or domestic edition of an imported item.

Product Reviews

It's easy to explain and play... but be careful to understand the scoring. Scoring
happens throughout the game. Place your tile to match other flowers. You score and
maybe several other players score as well. The key, of course, is to make sure you
score more.

While the strategy is important for older children and adults, younger people can
play along. Just pick a tile, lay it down and score it.

Well, don't get me wrong about the three stars. There's
nothing
"wrong" with this game per se; clear and simple rules and
clean game
play. You lay tiles with flowers on them hoping to surround
the most
points (thus winning them), while hopefully getting your
oponents to
waste flowers winning low points. Fairly straightfoward, and
there are
a number of different and unobvious strategies possible.

The only reason I don't give it more is that it's just
not super
involving. It's a little dry and bean-counterish.

What's interesting is that there are indications that the
game
designers had originally tried to pump more into this game
but then
decided at the last minute to keep things simple. For
instance, there
are "up" arrows on the points tiles but there's no meaning
to this
orientation. Also, there are paths but in the end they also
mean nothing.

In the end, however, those elements probably tested
badly, adding
complexity for its own sake.

So I'd bet that for the kind of people who like this kind
of game they
will love Gardens because it's good-looking, well made and
relatively
interesting.

I admit that Carat is not the world's most wonderful game, but there is something about it that does catch my fancy.

On first glance, it looks as though the game should be fairly simple. All you're doing, after all, is placing a square tile on the board that gives a number--and the same number, at that--to the four competing colors. Yet choosing the best spot for that tile often turns out to take a minute or two of thought. The number you need for your own color on one side of the square gives that same number to the other three colors on the other three sides, you see... and therein lies the challenge.

I'd also like to mention that we found the three-tile variation not to take especially longer than the basic one-tile rule. It seemed to make playing more fun, as you were more likely to have a tile you were glad to play, and thus faster, since you didn't sit and worry which of your two or three bad choices you were going to force yourself to take.

Carat is not for everybody, since you have to enjoy playing around with simple arithmetic... but if you do, this is a nice game to do it with! Colorful, clever, clear, and quick.

Leave the family heirlooms alone. The jewels you need are tiles, each having four colors (red, green, blue, and yellow) and a value from one to six. Start by placing the 49 scoring chips on the 7 x 7 grid of circles. These are numbered from one to five, and mark the corners of a 6 x 6 grid of octagons. Each player in turn randomly draws a tile and plays it on an octagon next to a previously played tile if possible. The value of a surrounded scoring chip, multiplied by the number of adjacent colors, is awarded to the player whose adjacent color has the highest unique total. Since each tile has all the players' colors, you must weigh the effects on everyone when you consider possible placements. There's plenty of opportunity here for sparkling play.

For about five years Dirk Henn has been designing games and making them available through his own small company, db Spiele, but it has been a very low key operation and almost the only way to get hold of a copy of one of them was to be at Essen and to know what he looked like--db Spiele were so small scale that they didn't even have a stall. The hope in such circumstances is presumably that one of the big companies will take a fancy to one of your designs and take over the publication and last year it happened, with Queen Games turning what had been Premiere into Show Manager. It proved to be a critical and commercial success and so it is no surprise to find that Queen's next move was to see what else Dirk had in the cupboard. Carat is one of two that they picked out for their 1998 list. The other, Stimmt so!, is also reviewed this issue.

Carat is an abstract tile laying game with no real pretence at a theme: the reference to jewels just being something the graphics people could use in the design of the tiles. The board shows a 7 by 7 lattice of small circles, which form the corners of a 6 by 6 grid of squares. At the start of the game, 49 scoring chips, each carrying a value in the range 1 to 5, are placed on the circles. The other components are 36 tiles, the surface of each of which is quartered: blue, green, red and yellow. Each tile also has a value in the range 1 to 6, this value applying to all four colours on the tile.

On your turn you draw a tile and place it on the grid, adjacent to one of the tiles that is already there. By the end, when all 36 tiles have been placed, each scoring chip will have been surrounded by 1, 2 or 4 tiles (1 for the four corner chips, 2 for the edge chips and 4 for the rest). As soon as it is completely surrounded, each chip scores for the player who has most points adjacent to it. For example, suppose that a chip with a value of 4 ends up surrounded by a red 2, a red 3, a blue 4 and a yellow 1. It would score for red, whose total of 5 edges out blue's total of 4, and it would be worth its base value of 4 multiplied by the number of colours present. That is 3 in this case and so red would score 12. Change the red 2 to a green 2 and the chip would be worth 16, this time to blue. The only tweak is the Hol's der Geier rule that in the event of a tie, the chip goes to the next person down. So, if you change the blue 4 to a blue 5 in my example, it would be yellow that would score the 12, since red and blue are now tied.

And that is all there is to it. There is a variant in which players maintain a hand of three tiles, from which they choose the one that they want to play, but you will find that the basic "draw a tile and play it" still gives you plenty to think about. Every time you place a tile, four scoring chips are being affected and with only one of the four is it your colour that is being given the boost. So you need to consider the total effect of a placement and not just what happens at one of the circles.

It is a good game and plays better than I thought it would when I first read through the rules. However, Nuremberg produced a clutch of good games this year and if you were to ask me for a list of the best five, Carat wouldn't be on it. It is a 7 whose misfortune it is to appear at the same time as a bunch of 8 and overs. I also think that it is slightly over-priced for what you get.